I stopped eating meat in 1988 because I objected to the factory farming methods and use of hormones and chemicals to accelerate growth. I also believe that we are not naturally meat eaters. We simply do not have the right teeth and intestines to process meat. It is only because humans learnt to use weapons and fire that we became meat eaters.
Today I have read a couple of articles that have rekindled my passion for convincing others to also stop eating meat because stopping eating meat is the single most important action we can all take to slow global warming and damage to the environment.
UN Secretary General warns business on looming water crisis
Right now there is a looming water crisis that will eclipse the oil shortages. Now this is not an easy thing to understand where I live in Hull where our water crisis is about too much not too little, but we are using clean drinkable water faster than it is being replenished so we are depleting the underground reserves.
World Water Crisis
Where does meat eating come into this? 70 % of water consumption is for agriculture and most of this is for meat production. Producing one kilo of potatoes requires 100 litres of water. Producing one kilo of beef requires between up to 13,000 litres of water. In addition there is a significant consumption of oil in heating the huge sheds where the animals are kept and in producing the fertilizers for feed production, hormones and other chemicals to keep the animals alive and in processing waste. (Cattle produce 130 time more waste them humans now)
Most of the merciless destruction of rain forests is to provide farmland either to graze cattle or to produce animal feed. If you eat beans you get the same food energy as beef producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide. Cattle produce one fifth of the global methane emissions. Methane is 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming.
Finally there are frightening consequence of meat eating we really are not able to measure. Natural wildlife is relentlessly destroyed by shooting, poison or burning because it is seen as a threat to meat production. Add to this the impact of animal waste and destruction of habitat and we have 25% of mammalian species now in danger of extinction not to mention the plants, plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects that are an essential part of our delicate eco system.
How food choices can help save the environment
Meat eating is simply no longer sustainable and the sooner everyone realises that - the sooner we will start to make a real impact on environment damage.
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Hi Rikki, I have to disagree when you say that we don't have the right teeth or digestive systems to eat meat. We have canine and incisors, these are purely for meat. Also we have nutritional requirements for meat that has allowed the human animal to develop the big brain that has separated us from the other animal species. Vegetarians struggle to get sufficient proteins that are readily abundant in meat and in tribal societies, vegetarianism is practiaclly unheard of. Without a diet based around meat, particularly fish in the early anthropological sense, we wouldn't be where we are today. We have enzymes that enable us to break down meat products but not plant products. Animals that are herbivorous have several stomachs to help them digest cellulose. We don't need to as we get many more calories from the muscle that we ingest.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a problem with vegetarians, it's just that I am a trained biochemist with an interest in anthropology and am a stickler for such things.
Adam
Hi Adam
ReplyDeleteI think it would be interesting to see a human being catch kill; and eat a pig or a cow or a sheep without any tools or access to fire. And if this brain is so good, how come we are systematically destroying and poisoning our own habitats rendering them unable to sustain us.
I can understand that since we have learned to use tools and fire to help us to consume meat our bodies have been adapting however apes generally are not carnivores and those cases where apes are known to eat other apes tend to be connected to major habitat degradation and stress.
It seems likely that we have as a species been fish eaters especially as unlike other apes we are able to swim and enjoy doing so, which may explain why, compared to other primates, we have little body hair.
The issues I raised in this post is really more about the quantity of meat eaten. We are not carnivores, yet our diet seems to be increasingly all meat and unless we do start to moderate our meat consumption the consequences will be dire when the water shortages really start to bite.